SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

Examples include AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. This early phase is where you’re still looking for that perfect product-market fit and scaling the product to market. Also, they had a direct sales team mainly selling to enterprises in a top-down sales motion. “[The And remember to scale. But it pays off!

Outsourcing Services 284

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 284

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2023

Scaling Early-Stage to Hyper-Growth Companies With Ed Lenta, SVP and GM of Databricks Back in the early 2000s, people didn’t entirely accept that a virtual machine could be as good as a physical one. Ed Lenta, the SVP and GM of Databricks, had the rare opportunity of scaling three hypergrowth companies — VMware, AWS, and Databricks.

Scale 259

Scale Scaling AWS Sales Hiring 259

SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

Whether you’re going from nothing to something or already scaling and thriving beyond $10-100M, healthy, sustainable growth in SaaS is on every founder’s mind. Cockroach Labs’ CEO Spencer Kimball shares hard-won lessons from scaling from $0 to $5B and his time as an angel investor for more than 80 different startups. Ideas Are Cheap.

Scale 243

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Cloud 243

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2021

It’s a familiar problem for all companies that scale fast – how do you keep your core technologies manageable for the increasing number of teams that depend on them? How our core technologies were being used was also diverging, leading to needlessly increased complexity in our systems. Scaling to Rails. Expanding responsibility.

Scale 216

Scale Technical Review Technology Scaling 216

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2022

This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Scale. So for the audience, cloud giants are turbocharging startup sales, and the predominant reason for this is because they’re fundamentally changing IT budgets at the customers that we’re all selling to. AWS’s marketplace has seen 1.5 Rico Mallozzi, Sr.

Scale 259

Scale Marketplace as a Service Cloud SaaS Payments 259

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS.

Scale 239

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 239

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Dear SaaStr: What are the best 5 points to improve poor sales performance? Here are my 5 simplest ideas to quickly improve sales performance. Concentrate leads in those who can close. Leads are too precious. Not to save money, but to concentrate the leads you do have in those that can close them. Let them go.

Scale 273

Scale Sales Hiring Sales AWS 273

SaaStr

APRIL 14, 2023

cons is closer to 16% growth — Jordan Novet (@jordannovet) April 13, 2023 So Amazon came out with its latest annual shareholder letter and it was even more cautious on AWS growth than I was expected. AWS said they weren’t going to push folks to sign punitivate contracts, or block downgrades, etc. Lower than I predicted.

AWS 283

AWS Scale Sales Management 283

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 4, 2022

The budgets are >still< there, but they're harder to access, so sales needs to understand what your buyer's true goals are for next year and align with it. A similar story with arguably the #1 public leader in next-generation sales tools. So a great one to look at if you sell into sales. More on that here.

AWS 330

AWS Azure Cloud Scale 330

FastSpring

APRIL 29, 2025

When payment partners fail to adapt to player demand and scale quickly, players leave your web shop empty handed, creating dissatisfaction that could have been prevented. We empower you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and more.

Payment Services 133

Payment Services Payments Payment Solutions Payment Methods 133

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

With so many incredible sessions to choose from, we thought we’d highlight a few for you here: Building & Scaling Global Product Teams. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends: Lessons Learned with AWS’ Head of Customer Success Harini Gokul. Why Customer Success and Product Should be Best Friends.

AWS 246

AWS Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring 246

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

Call me when it scales.” The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably has less predictive value concerning a company’s ability to get to true scale than most people think – or at least thought some years ago. Being a seed investor I’m trying to find SaaS companies that can scale before they have scaled.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

Q: Dear SaaStr: Should a Startup Founder Handle Sales Themself When First Getting Started? The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. It’s to scale a tiny engine into something bigger. That way, she knows.

Sales Hiring 274

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 274

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 20, 2022

This principle is best illustrated by a few examples from over the years, demonstrating how “ Be technically conservative” allows us to scale fast while ultimately not being a constraint. As a company scales, there is a risk that some team members will follow the principles dogmatically or interpret them incorrectly.

Scale 160

Scale Technical Review Scaling Software Review 160

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Many have used Digital Ocean at the cheaper, simpler version of AWS-Azure-Digital Ocean to get going fast and quickly. Or at least, maybe like many, tougher times meant holding the line on costs and people, leading to even more efficiency. But at scale, even the slightly less long version of the tail is where the money is.

Scale 291

Scale AWS Azure Cloud 291

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2020

To make a partnership successful, your startup will need to teach another sales team to sell your product. The sales team asks for more leads. After scaling sales enablement successfully, the next step is to understand where your customers are. Here are my notes. Where to Start. Types of Partnerships.

Scale 349

Scale AWS Consulting Sales Enablement 349

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

So to serve both segments at the simultaneously, ZoomInfo has been rolling out a Product-led sales motion, that gives the ability for an SMB customer to sign up directly on their website for a free trial and grow into a paid customer, without ever having to talk to an sales rep or go through a demo process. So, what’s new at ZoomInfo?

New CTO 312

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire 312

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

The SaaS sales model seems so well-established, as hundreds of founders build their businesses and raise funding. Mark Roberge, Founder of Stage 2 Capital and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, shares insights from his years of experience into common SaaS sales missteps and how you can avoid them.

Sales Hiring 257

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 257

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 30, 2020

Prior to HashiCorp Adam was the Head of Worldwide Developer Marketing at AWS and held senior positions at Pivotal, VMware, and SpringSource. My partner Astasia Myers will be leading the discussion. With two decades of experience, Adam is well-versed in developer evangelism. She writes often on topics like these on our blog Memory Leak.

Development 317

Development Scale AWS Scaling 317

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

Pursuing Two Different Segments: The Tale of Startups vs. Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, is in a very different set that also competes with Microsoft, but AWS is considered their biggest competitor in the market. What they’re seeing with GenAI and Google Cloud is an opportunity to grab share from AWS.

Cloud 309

Cloud Scale AWS AI 309

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2021

So we’ve had a lot of fun in our 5 Interesting Learnings profiling the top SaaS and Cloud companies at scale, from Slack to Zoom, from Shopify to Datadog, from Box to DropBox. But are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud just too big for us to learn from? And it’s gone much more aggressive in its sales motions.

Cloud 294

Cloud Azure AWS Scale 294

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

At Glasswing Ventures, they tell their AI-native companies not to lead with AI because it’s such a superficial indication of interest. When you take the data, you may have a business goal of making more sales or delighting the customer. What should founders know about the modern AI stack that Enterprises can scale on?

AI Search 287

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 287

SaaStr

AUGUST 16, 2022

But even there, to truly scale, they went more enterprise and built out a full enterprise sales and marketing function. What works to get you leads? The magic is in getting them together, and inviting a bunch of prospects. And invite all your prospects and your customers. At least for a while. But I was wrong.

Scale 331

Scale Sales Hiring Marketing SaaS 331

Hitenism

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In 2006, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped pioneer what we now call the cloud, product development changed forever. Today, one-third of daily internet users visit websites built on top of AWS. AWS is now an $11.5B Working backwards isn’t a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS.

AWS 189

AWS New CTO Scale CTO 189

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Why did sales-driven Qualtrics get to $100m+ in ARR without ever raising a nickel, and generating more than $20m a year in free cash flow ? Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? Sales, done right, should be accretive (although expect sales efficiency to ultimately decline post-Initial Scale).

Scale 293

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 293

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2023

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: It’s Now Year 2 of the Venture Downturn Clawbacks and Tracking-to-Cash: Two Sales Management Tools to Be Thoughtful With 8 Things That Are Just Harder in SaaS Now Tier 1 VC is Great. But More Money May Be Even Better. What’s Holding Up Buyers?:

Scale 246

Scale AWS Scaling Enterprise 246

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

If you don’t think you need a great VP of Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Engineering — then all that all that means is you’ve never worked with a great one. Here again, we have the same problems as the Customer Success lead hire, but worse. To me the first question is — do you have leads?

Sales Hiring 284

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Sales Recruiting 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

CloudKeeper from TO THE NEW, is a cloud spend optimization solution that guarantees to cut down your AWS bills by 5-15%. With CloudKeeper, we have helped 200+ of our customers optimize their AWS spend with a guaranteed reduction in their AWS bills. No lock-ins. Savings from Day 1. RI pricing for On-demand usage.

Cloud spend optimization 260

Cloud spend optimization AWS Scale compliance 260

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

The Challenges and Pitfalls of a Partner Ecosystem Drata attributes much of its success to its partner ecosystem, which is an interesting case study for most, so how do they break up marketing, sales, and resource allocation vs. a more direct-sales modeled business? AWS can’t support 20 partners equally.

AWS 279

AWS Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 279

SaaStr

AUGUST 3, 2024

Overall Cloud spending has bounced back off lows for sure: AWS at a $105B run rate growing 19% Quarterly YoY growth trends below. Yes, AI has fueled Nvidia and Google Cloud and Microsoft and AWS to massive growth, and growth that has accelerated the past few quarters. OneStream had an epic SaaS IPO at $500m ARR, growing 34%.

AWS 235

AWS Scale Social Media AI 235

SaaStr

JUNE 28, 2023

Still, always helpful to see how any leader does free to paid at scale. Spending a Hefty 50% of Revenue on Sales and Marketing. They spend a pretty high 50% of all revenue on sales and marketing — and that’s up from last year. And interesting to see they are growing the top of the funnel, Free, faster than Paid: #3.

Scale 258

Scale AWS Scaling Revenue 258

SaaStr

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Customers range from AWS skills-builder platforms with billions of users to Zoom using it for customers and employees. When a new sales leader comes in, they usually say the data is messed up, difficult to comprehend, and unclear about where leads are coming from. The bigger you scale, the harder this can be.

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring Scale SMB Outsourced Development 277

SaaStr

MARCH 6, 2024

Seat Contractions Have Brought NRR Down From 120% to 111% While 111% NRR is still quite an engine at this scale, the drop in NRR from seat contractions explains a good chunk of the headwinds Okta has seen. #2. AWS alone generated $175m of contract value for Okta, growing 130%. Way, way too many startups focus 100% on direct sales.

Fractional VPE 282

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Scale SMB 282

SaaStr

AUGUST 20, 2019

In this session, Anna and Sameer will highlight SendGrid’s journey from growth stage through acquisition and why focusing on people and culture is mission critical to success as a company goes through the scaling process. We were signing up hundreds of new paying customers every month with five sales reps. Anna Khan | VP @ BVP.

Scale 155

Scale Acquisition Scaling Sales Hiring 155

SaaStr

JANUARY 29, 2023

Even If It’s Awful for Series A-E Rounds. SaaStr 628: Revenue Alignment: How to Pull Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Together with Divvy CRO Sterling Snow  2. SaaStr 629: CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment in 2023 For Candidates and Hiring Managers With Flexport’s Ben Braverman   3. Really, Really, Low.

Sales Recruiting 244

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale AWS 244

SaaStr

JUNE 18, 2022

Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Shradha Kothari, Chief of Staff, SVP & GM North America Sales @ Twilio. Jen Dawson @ AWS. Dale Chang, Operations Partner @ Scale Venture Partners (panel). Patricia Hanna, VP Americas Sales Ops @ Confluent. Lars Nilsson, VP, Global Sales Development @ Snowflake.

CTO 280

CTO Scale New CTO AWS 280

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2023

AWS is seeing this, and so is Snowflake. But it’s the $1M+ ones that are fueling the big numbers at this scale. Also you can see sales & marketing headcount is basically flat, while hiring is almost all in engineering / R&D. So when CFOs and others tighten budgets, they’ll also try to buy less Snowflake.

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Headcount Scale Sales Hiring AWS 246